


All Those Senseless Scars

by notapartytrick



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, BAMF Peter Parker, BAMF Tony Stark, Escape, Gen, Hurt Peter Parker, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, Irondad, It all works out in the end okay don't @ me, Kidnapped Peter Parker, Kidnapping, Mental Health Issues, Peter Parker Gets a Hug, Peter Parker Needs a Break, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Peter Parker Whump, Physical Abuse, Precious Peter Parker, Recovery, Self-Esteem Issues, Sensory Overload, Solitary Confinement, Sort Of, The Friendly Neighborhood Exchange 2020, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, Tony Stark Feels, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Has Issues, Trauma, Whump, You're Welcome, see it's for an exchange so i have an excuse, yet another kidnapping fic because I seem to excel at them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:15:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25205335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notapartytrick/pseuds/notapartytrick
Summary: There is a rule to the way Peter lives now. He didn’t know it at first, but he learnt it.It’s simple.To earn what he needs to survive, he has to make sacrifices.---Peter Parker's life is derailed when he's kidnapped and kept in a white-tiled room with nothing: no windows, no cameras, no food, no water, no phone, nobody else. Only his own thoughts keep him from losing his mind. If he asks for anything, he must take punishment.Tony Stark will stop at nothing to bring him home.
Relationships: May Parker (Spider-Man) & Peter Parker, May Parker (Spider-Man) & Peter Parker & Tony Stark, May Parker (Spider-Man) & Tony Stark, Michelle Jones & Ned Leeds & Peter Parker, Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Tony Stark & Peter Parker
Comments: 97
Kudos: 333
Collections: The Friendly Neighborhood Exchange





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kingdomfaraway](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kingdomfaraway/gifts).



> Fic title from Don't Be Scared, I Love You (Yawny Yawn) by Bill Ryder-Jones  
> @kingdomfaraway, I hope this work lives up to your expectations and isn't too dark!!  
> Massive thanks to my beta JolinarJackson for last-minute editing, encouragement, and helpful pointers when I'm flailing over single words I can't remember!  
> Having just written a kidnapping fic, I had a bit of a hard time with differentiating this from The Room Where It Happens and giving it a life of its own, but some well-timed inspiration and conversation gave me the boost I needed to bang this baby out just in time for the exchange deadline! This is also my first exchange fic ever, and I'm immensely pumped about it :)  
> (See the tags for content warnings. If you're not a fan of reading about kidnapping, physical abuse, flashbacks, sensory overloads, abuse recovery, etc. it's best to give this one a miss! Stay safe, loves.)

There is a rule to the way Peter lives now. He didn’t know it at first, but he learnt it.

It’s simple.

To earn what he needs to survive, he has to make sacrifices.

\---

When he wakes up, he knows he’s been out for a long time. There’s a cotton-wool quality to his train of thought.

He’s in a white cell.

And he’s completely naked.

“Oh my God, oh - what the…?” 

He rushes to get up from the floor and cover himself, jamming himself into a corner. “Shit.” 

His heart judders violently in his chest. There’s nothing to see, nothing at all, nothing but the white tiled walls of his prison. No window. No camera. No food, no water, no guards,  _ no clothes, oh God. _

_ What did they do while I was out? _

But he isn’t in any pain that he can notice. Even with his enhanced healing, it’s unlikely he was asleep for long enough for complete healing to take place, so he thinks - he  _ thinks _ \- he’s safe in that respect.

Not in any other.

He’d been in the Spider-Man suit when they took him; the fact that his mask is no longer on him means they already know a lot more about him than he’d like.

He’s utterly clueless. He knows nothing; nothing, except that he’s trapped.

“Hello?” he calls tentatively, then desperately. “ _ Hello!  _ Is anyone, is anyone around? Please - I need--”

In under ten seconds, his calls are answered by the clang of the door opening.

Peter faces bad guys on the daily. He slips on his cocky persona like a second skin now after over a year of patrolling Queens. But it’s a whole lot easier when he’s in the suit. Instead, he instinctively huddles away from the four masked figures that storm into his cell.

There’s an overload of adrenaline pulsing through him stirred through with the dregs of sedatives which makes it impossible to think straight. He’s at a loss for quips.

“It’s alright,” issues a voice. Peter can’t tell who’s speaking behind the masks, but the tone is bafflingly soothing. “We’re here to reason with you.”

Peter prepares himself for a lengthy monologue detailing the way in which Spider-Man had wronged them, but it doesn’t arrive. One of the figures simply asks, “What would you like?”

It’s mystifying. Peter stays silent.

“Would you like some clothes?”

“Yes,” Peter can’t help but blurt, despite every ounce of logic he’s ineffectually grappling for like grains of sand, despite his sixth sense that cries out a never-ending chorus of  _ danger danger danger danger _ .

The group nods in tandem.

And then, in precise, almost mechanical movements, they tear Peter from his corner and drop him so his face hits the floor. Then there are hands all over him, pressing his back and legs and arms to the ground, and he fights them - but finds he can't. His strength is gone.

A slew of panic grips him in its hold so violently that the room twists sickeningly around him.

The floor is freezing against his bare skin. He’s noticing now just how cold the whole room is. 

The hands on him are rough and unsympathetic. But the taser is worse.

Before Peter even has a chance to speak, to protest, it's jammed into his side and activated. Peter's brain whites out instantly with the agony. It's too much. It has his limbs juddering against the floor, his mouth open in a scream he can't even find the wherewithal to let out, a heated pressure in his brain building and building and building upon itself until he’s sure it’s about to shatter his skull, ricocheting off the walls and battering him yet again, more pain, more pain.

There's a second of silent respite. Eerily quiet. He drags in ragged breaths.

Then it begins again.

Peter has no sense of time. It makes the torture feel endless.

After they're finished with him, he doesn't move from the spot where he'd been held down, every fibre of his body reeling, shorting out, fizzling with the aftershocks of the electricity.

"Now you've had your punishment, you can have some clothes. This is how things will work here. Once you have made a sacrifice, we will give you what you ask for."

“What, what are you - what do you want?”

“We want to test you. You have remarkable capabilities. We will discover just how remarkable they are.” 

A pair of boxers is tossed into the cell as the masked group leaves. Peter crawls over to them and pulls them on through a bout of tremors, feeling the sour sting of shame enveloping him.

He knows that this is bad. Worse than bad, it's - a whole host of other words that he can't summon from his frazzled, drugged mind.

His kidnappers don't want money or leverage. They just want to break him.

So he resolves not to let them.

The group enters his box in intervals he presumes are daily - maybe twice a day, he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know anything. They ask him politely if he'd like anything, and he doesn't ask for anything. They don't touch him.

Apart from their entry and exit, there's nothing. There's his box and himself. White, silent, tiny. Maybe ten by ten feet. Nothing.

So he fills up the nothing with talking.

"Actinium, aluminum, americium, antimony, argon, arsenic, astatine," he reels off. "Barium, berkelium, beryllium, bismuth, bohrium, boron, bromine."

He knows the elements. They're comforting but don't hold the bittersweetness of memories of before.

_ "Stay safe, kiddo," Tony called towards Peter as he rushed into the elevator that would take him out of the Tower and home before May could have his ass for being late to dinner. _

_ The last words he'd said to Peter. _

He climbs on the walls and ceiling, hammers at every inch of the tiling, bloodies his knuckles doing it, but he's only human now.

"C'mon," he grits, slamming his side into the wall. "Please, c'mon."

It won't give.

He sinks to the floor, still wracked with jitters, and cradles his head in his hands.

"Don't cry, Peter. Gonna use up water. Stop it, stop."

And, after knuckling his eyes until they ache, he manages to stop.

He knows that an inactive person can survive up to a week without water and almost a month without food. Mostly, that’s what he has to worry about, as well as the cold, which isn’t so severe as to give him frostbite but is enough that within his first few hours in captivity he becomes used to the incessant chattering of his jaw and wonders where the aftershocks of the taser end and the shivering begins.

That, and going insane.

“Cadmium, calcium, californium, carbon... cerium, cesium, chlorine... chromium… uh - cobalt. Cobalt. Copernicium. Copper. Curium.”

Peter likes to talk. He’ll talk whether there are people to listen to him or not, but he’ll admit that he prefers getting to talk to other people. He starts to miss it like hell, actually.

“You know what I should’ve done?” he says aloud, grinning, “I, I really should’ve brought my Chemistry homework with me. I’m so behind. And I’m supposed to be, like, the big science guy, right?”

Flopping to the floor, no longer noticing the coldness of it, he lies limply there for a moment, trying to wrangle his thoughts. “Or I could’ve just done it when I was supposed to. Would’ve cut into my patrol time, though, so, um - hm. Ugh, indecisive.” Affecting the upright demeanour of Captain America in his PSA videos, he crosses his arms: “Choose a thing, Mr. Parker.” 

He laughs at himself, but it comes out wrong. It sounds too loud, too close to a sob.

“Choice is great, isn’t it?” he muses, watching the white ceiling. “One day, when I - yeah. The next thing I choose, it’d better be something awesome. Let’s make a deal. Yeah, okay, sure. The next thing, the next thing I choose to do is gonna be -  _ monumental _ . Nice word. You could fool people into thinking you, thinking you take English. Eh, who am I kidding? I’m not an English kid. Look at me.”

He’s sobered by his own words.

When he grows tired, he sleeps on the ceiling. He doesn’t have a bed, and it feels just a little safer up there.

There are a lot of things he doesn’t have. His phone is nowhere to be seen. No shower or sink. No toilet. No clothes but his boxers. No mirror. No toothpaste. No friends.

The low-grade fuzziness of his brain doesn’t abate with time although he isn’t injected with anything else and doesn’t eat or drink, which leads him to believe the drugs are being circulated in the air of his cell. It would explain the masks, too.

The guys who took him really have it down to a tee. It’s terrifying.

And it wears down on him.

Thirst is an awful thing. It drags greedy claws down his parched tongue, reminding him every minute of the dryness of his throat. From his chapped lips to the very depths of his stomach there festers a growing sickness, a sensation of shriveling from the inside out until his skin begins to split and talking becomes painful. He does it anyway, clings to his own words because they’re real and solid and won’t jump out and scare him like the nightmares that begin to haunt him even while he’s awake.

On what he hopes is the third night after he woke up in his box, he wakes with a jolt from a dream of a thousand faceless beasts tearing away at him and falls from the ceiling. The moment he tries to get back up, he passes out.

The hunger begins to plague him too, gnawing at his muscles and weakening them. Standing is effortful. It becomes more and more tempting to ask for something as the days creep by and Peter feels himself falling apart.

“Palladium, phosphorus, platinum. P… Polonium? No. Uh. P-L. P-L… plutonium. Polonium. Potassium, protactinium, praseodymium - I mean, praseodymium, protactinium… you know what, shit. I don’t care. Don’t care about the elements--”

Imagining a telephone is sitting on the floor beside him, one of those old-fashioned plastic ones with a curly cord, he sticks his fingers against the side of his head in the universal position to indicate holding a phone and dials a number in his head.

“Hi, May,” he rasps. “Don’t come over, I’ve gotta clean up a bit first. Yeah.” He chuckles. 

If he listens hard enough, he can pick out an amused reply. 

“Are you good? I’m good. You know what you could do, though? Bring some paint. Or some colourful furniture. Anything but white. It’s boring as heck.”

He squeezes his eyes shut against a thundering headache, feeling the skin around his eyes cracking, his heart fluttering wildly, scalpels of hunger piercing his sides, his thoughts becoming formless, untamable things.

“May?” he falters. “Can you tell Mister Stark to come and get me, please? I don’t wanna… what am I supposed to do?”

The group enters on the fifth day. Peter is lying on the floor where he’s been for an unfathomable period of time.

“Would you like anything?” asks one of the masked people.

“Water,” he whispers. “Please. Water.”

He braces himself for the taser this time, but it’s a boot that meets his side instead. Another. A flurry. A stampede.

_ You get beaten up all the time on patrol. _ But it’s different when it’s just him, weak, pathetic, unable to stand, half-naked, against these four figures that become tyrannical gods to him as they hold him in the air by his hair, his neck, and beat him bloody.

Peter can do nothing to shield himself from the blows - and moreover, if he does it will jeopardize his chance of getting the water he needs so badly. So, swallowing back a rush of shame, he just takes it.

He can’t help the noises that escape him, however: the grunts as boots connect with his stomach, the whimpers at hands yanking at his hair, the groans as fists clad in brass knuckles meet his face over and over and over again. Blood pours from his nose, trickles from cuts across his cheekbones, temples, eyebrows. He feels a rib snap.

A water bottle is placed by the door as the group leaves. There are maybe 300 millilitres inside.

Peter lays on the floor and watches his blood pool slowly on the pristine tiles.

After twenty agonising seconds of dragging himself across the floor, he reaches the bottle, fumbling desperately to unscrew the cap, and takes a greedy swig of the liquid, at first moaning in relief at the way it gushes down his throat, then regretting his haste as he retches it right back up.

“Crap, Peter,” he mumbles to himself, arms trembling in their effort to hold him off the now-slippery floor. “Stupid. God. Shit. Stop swearing.”

Although his every instinct screams for him to down the water, he forces himself to take small sips. When there’s about half left, he pulls the bottle away and reluctantly caps it, saving the rest.

Then, ignoring the mortification that swells up in him at the prospect of what he will do next, he bends low to the puddle on the floor and laps up every drop of moisture he can find.

He’s a wild animal. He’s insane.

When he’s finished, he lets his arms and legs give out under him and grits his teeth against excruciating waves of pain from his battered body.

It’s simple, really. He endured the punishment; he was given what he asked for.

Though Peter is half-sure he’s already lost his mind, he does know that he needs to make a plan, to rationalize his situation as well as he can with his fuddled brain. Escape is not an option, and neither is refusing punishment.

He swallows and tastes blood.

“Here’s what’s, here’s what’s gonna happen, Peter. Okay? Just get stuff you really, really need. Okay. I’ve got water for tomorrow. Just… uh, ask the day after. And food. No more clothes.”

His rambling words become his life plan.

He’s forced to make adjustments the next time the group visits, however, when his half-full water bottle is taken from him.

Desperation overrides him. He lunges at the figure who holds the bottle, sticking his fingers to it. “Don’t! Please, don’t take it--”

Almost the moment he touches them, an ear-splittingly piercing whistle assaults Peter’s ears, forcing him to unstick himself in favour of dropping painfully to the floor and cramming his hands over his ears. Whatever drug he’s being fed in his cell hasn’t taken away a fraction of his enhanced senses: the noise drills clean through his eardrums and rattles his weary brain in his skull. He bites back a cry of pain. He doesn’t know why; he already looks utterly pathetic.

There’s no water that day.

The next, he asks for food. After breaking his arm, the group gives him a cheese sandwich that tastes better than anything he’s eaten before, even though he has to eat it with one hand.

His white box is steadily getting dirtier, painted with bloodstains, sweat, even puddles of piss. At least there are colours now, not just white, white, white.

“I’m doing great,” he reassures himself after he’s counted twenty visits from the group. There are forty lash marks across his back. He knows; he felt every strike of the whip. But at least he received a blanket in return. It was too cold, so he strayed from his plan. 

He’s been tased and beaten again, had his nose and collarbone and forearm and fingers broken. Every movement he makes hurts somewhere, so he stays still.

“Mister Stark is, he’s, he’s on his way. He’s, uh… fixing his hair. Like he always does when he, when he gets out of the suit. To look cool. When he comes - God, it’s gonna be so nice. I don’t care about his hair. I just... want him.”

He feels closer to a carcass than a human being.

“Get me out, Mister Stark. Get me  _ out, _ Mister Stark. Why haven’t you come?”

The feral desperation he’s finding it harder and harder to tamp down rears its head again, and he finds himself crying out with all the volume his torn-up throat can muster. “Mister Stark,  _ please  _ \- I can’t stay here, going crazy, they’re gonna kill me. Save me _. _ ”

It seems like the world is laughing his face when the group enters the twenty-first time and he’s asked, “Would you like to see Tony Stark?”

“What?” he croaks.

His mind can’t comprehend the thought.  _ Tony Stark _ darts around his mind, turns itself inside out and emerges in his consciousness shrunken and frayed around the edges like it’s been washed too many times.

“Would you like to see Tony Stark?”

“I, uh…” even attempting a few words of conversation feels foreign to him. “Is he there?”

There’s no response from the group. 

Peter is faced with one of the most frightening choices of his life.

He could accept the punishment on the off-chance that Mister Stark was really there and risk being hurt for nothing; or he could refuse and risk letting Tony down if, by some crazy chance, he was out there and needed Peter to come to him.

Locking his jaw to offset the tremors there, he shuts his eyes.

“Okay.”

Though he braces himself for the instant onslaught of punishment, instead he finds himself being hauled up from the floor and dragged towards the invisible outline of the door.    
The  _ door _ . 

He whimpers at unforgiving hands yanking at his bad arm, making an aborted attempt at scrambling to his feet. He’s too weak, too injured. And at the same time, he’s nearing the door, the door that hasn’t let him out in twenty-one days but swings open now.

Peter can’t quite determine whether this is real or not.

His heart awaits the inevitable punishment, thudding restlessly in his chest, but he’s entranced by the door closing behind him, revealing more tiles, a corridor, his arm throbs, tiles, pain, tiles. He reels.

The moment they turn the corner, an abrupt spreading of warmth at the base of Peter’s neck jolts him out of his daze of shock and compels him to lift his heavy head and meet the eyes of a man restrained by two guards, a man facing him, a man who  _ sees _ him.

“Kid! Hi, kid. It’s me.  _ What did you do to him? _ Pete.  _ Pete. _ I’m here, hey?”

“Mister Stark,” Peter breathes.

There’s worry in his eyes, as clear and piercing as a blade. Peter assumes he looks pretty crappy. He doesn’t feel it just now, however. All his thoughts are occupied with  _ Mister Stark Mister Stark Mister Stark _ , taking his breath away, melting away pain to reveal dizzying relief.

This is why he doesn’t notice at first.

Not until he hears, “Don’t you fucking  _ dare! _ Kiddo!”

Before he can attempt to jerk away from the hands keeping him in place, they tighten, another pair clamping over the top and bottom of his head so he just barely glimpses a match held to an approaching blowtorch.

Punishment always arrives.

It isn’t panic or desperation that overwhelms him in this precise moment, as time slows down and Tony’s cries of distress are suspended across milliseconds so the minutiae of his reaction rises, falls, intensifies in arcs that are distressingly beautiful. It’s an ugly conglomeration of a thousand pockets of hopelessness accumulated over twenty-one days, a Frankenstein’s monster of pure despair.

“ _ No _ ,” he moans uselessly, hanging limp from the hands. “Don’t do it. I can’t.”

“Kid?”

Peter sobs and yet can’t produce a single tear. “ _ Mister Stark _ .”

“Kid, you’re gonna be okay, you hear me? Just - look at me. Look at--”

Once, Peter came out of a patrol with a knife in his back, a moderate concussion and a torn hamstring. It was nothing compared to this.

The blowtorch is turned on the side of his face.

Peter screams, long and loud and raw, and the noise ricochets off the tiles and hits him anew. Unparalleled agony. He can’t turn away, no matter how desperately his mind screams for release. 

He will never forget just how awful it feels. The memory of it will imprint upon his mind forever, just as the white light of the instrument now sears his vision through his screwed-shut eyelids.

He feels his flesh melting.

“Kid!  _ Fuck! _ Don’t - I’m gonna  _ kill  _ you fuckers -  _ get away from him! _ ”

With a flicker, the torch cuts off. Peter can’t breathe, juddering violently against the hands that still hold him and fruitlessly opening and shutting his mouth. The aftershocks of the pain present a different form of horror entirely.

“Breathe, Pete,” comes a voice half-muffled by the violent ringing in his ears, a painfully kind voice, a voice he’s supposed to be safe when he hears. “Breathe through it. C’mon, kid.”

The first breath Peter manages to drag in is torn to shreds, shrivelled by tears he’s unable to shed.

“Kid,” Mister Stark calls again; the syllable is lost in the splintering of his own voice.

Peter manages a small whine.

“Now, Stark, what’s all this about making a deal?”

It’s a new voice, encroaching on Peter from behind and sending his crazed danger sense ringing off the hook.

With his chin forced upwards, Peter recognizes Norman Osborn instantly.

It all fits: the drug that took away his powers, the pristine tiles, the experiments.

He crouches before Peter and taps the newly burnt side of his face. It’s gentle but overwhelmingly painful all the same; Peter chokes on his breath.

“Get your fucking hands away from him, Osborn,” snarls Mister Stark. “This isn't what I’m here for.” Peter has never been more glad of his presence, as little as it seems to affect the punishments he’s given.

Osborn picks up on the grip the guards have on Tony with a smirk, rising to address him. “I can see that. I must say, I’m surprised you turned yourself in. What a sacrifice for this little boy.”

“Quit the fancy footwork.” Mister Stark sounds breathless, wild. “Are you gonna let him go or not?”

It’s only now that Peter’s brain catches on to what Tony is attempting to do.

He does his best to speak around the fried nerves on his face and the haze of shock he’s still trapped in, but all that emerges are pitiful, slurring murmurs. “D’n, m’s’r st’r. D’n t’n y’self in.”

Mister Stark understands the source of his panic and smiles brokenly at him. “It’s gonna be okay, kid. Don’t you worry.”

“N. Pl’s d’n.”

“No need to panic, Peter,” Osborn soothes sickeningly, “We don’t want anything to do with Stark.”

“ _ No. _ You’re gonna take me and leave him alone,” Mister Stark grits out with impressive stubbornness.

“Don’t you understand, Tony? This boy has strength you can’t imagine. Resilience. We’re making groundbreaking leaps in research.”

Tony is thunderous as he jostles his guards. “This is not  _ research _ . Give me the kid, or so help me, I’ll--”

“You’ll what?” laughs Osborn.

Something splinters in Tony’s eyes; behind it, Peter sees a plan.

“I’ll tear this place up.”

Before Osborn or any of the masked guards can react, Tony’s glasses flash bright blue and he yells, “FRIDAY, torch them!”

Peter’s mind disconnects from the flurry of what happens next. He’s tackled to the ground and cradled tightly; a fiery blast envelops the room; a chorus of shouts is cut off by silence and a persistent buzzing in his ears.

After twenty-one days of nothing, there is everything. It’s too staggering for him to comprehend for a minute or two.

There’s dust in the air. He watches it settle with eyes that have forgotten how to blink.

Finally, his mind creaks back to life, running on fumes but present enough to tell him that it’s Mister Stark who is wrapped protectively around him. A frenzied glance around the room shows heaps of crumbled tiles, fire, prone bodies.

_ Dead bodies? _

“M’s’r s’rk,” he coughs, hearing his voice dimly as if piped from speakers a hundred feet away. He finds the presence of mind to push at the man’s limp shoulder with his good hand. “G’t up. Y’ g’tta g’t up.”

Mister Stark’s eyes are shut and won’t open.

“Pl’s, m’s’r s’rk...”

Although Peter knows what he has to do, he dreads it.

Sucking in as much air as he can, he shifts himself onto his haunches and heaves his mentor over his shoulder.

The airborne drug has worn off to a degree now he’s outside his cell, returning a little of his strength to him, but the screaming of his injuries has in no way quietened, and he’s pitifully weak from cold, hunger and thirst. He staggers at the weight of Tony against his collarbone and arm, swallowing a cry in fear of waking any of the bad guys, but pushes on, inching towards the end of the corridor.

“C’m’n, Pe’r,” he breathes, fumbling at the doorknob with his one good hand, his bad hand stuck to Tony’s back despite the way it pulls at the snapped bones with every movement he makes. “Sh’t. C’m’n.” 

It’s open. It’s open.

He pulls himself one-handed up a ladder, his legs shaking beneath him, and shoulders open a circular trapdoor.

Outside, there is light.

Peter can’t help but collapse to his knees. The sky is there, wrapping him in an embrace that spans the heavens, cornflower blue and picturesque. Grass and trees glow green. And just fifty feet in front of them both is a roaring, seething freeway.

The noise hits Peter like a brick wall, like a fist with brass knuckles, like a strike from a whip. It surrounds him and invades his ears until there’s nothing but noise, noise Peter can pick apart in overwhelming detail: the friction of tires against tarmac, the smallest particles of grit tossed back and forth by lines of cars and vans and lorries with grumbling engines spitting plumes of carbon dioxide, a mechanical spray of pungently soapy water across a windshield, a chorus of laughter from a family whizzing by in an old Volvo, the tap of a cigarette against the rim of a half-open window, and people, people, people, people, passing him in their clamorous multitudes.

Setting Mister Stark down in the grass with as much gentleness as he can manage with his battered body and thundering heartbeat, Peter flounders, groaning at the grass stalks pricking his bare knees, hearing his breaths speeding up, recalling the sizzling of his skin under the blowtorch, unable to distinguish between the myriad of sensations assaulting him. Sight becomes sound, touch becomes smell, and each crowds his vision with hazy grey and sends wild tremors along the length of his limbs.

Peter’s going to explode.

But he doesn’t.

He recognizes the sign on the freeway. Although the text is painfully bright and jumps back and forth in front of him, he makes out the location. Only about two minute’s drive from the Compound.

He had been certain all good fortune had deserted him the moment he’d been thrown into his box, but today he wonders if someone is looking out for him after all.

All he has to do is walk, but walking has never been so difficult.

“Y’ g’tta go, Pe’r. Y’ c’n d’ it.”

Peter lurches to his feet, yelping when it jolts his back and collarbone. His vision whirls in front of him, spotted with black patches, but he does his best to pay no heed to his brokenness, lifting Tony tremulously over his shoulder.

Every step pains him, wears him out; he wonders every time he puts one foot in front of the other whether it’ll be his last step, whether his body will give up on him, and he comes close, stumbling and falling, but hauls himself back up.

He has to reach the Compound. It’s branded across his mind, the most important thought he has in there, and it keeps him going.

He’s getting out. He’s going home.

Fire licks at his face and knees and arm and fingers and collarbone and back and torso. Everywhere.

Between gasping breaths, he croaks encouragement to himself. “N’ly th’re. Y’ go’ this, Pe’r. Pl’s, keep goin’.”

He walks until the black spots have almost taken over his field of vision. Just as his knees give out under him yet again, he blinks and recognizes the sleek glass-and-steel buildings that he’s now among.

_ The Compound. _

Too exhausted to speak, he simply gets back up, keening at the agony of movement, and carries on. He’s only a few hundred feet away. Two hundred. One hundred and fifty. He prays FRIDAY will alert someone when they get there.

One hundred. He thinks he can make out the doors now, although he can’t hold his head up for longer than a moment and his vision is no good.

Exhaustion has taken on a new meaning for Peter.

He hardly notices that he’s crossed the threshold until the door hisses shut behind him and there’s a muffled, muted sound he thinks could be the frenzied clicking of high heels on a staircase. 

“How did this - Peter? Peter, honey?”

It’s Pepper.

The tone of her voice is blissfully familiar, dissolving the hold of adrenaline on his body and leaving it limp.

“I’m here,” he tries to say, but all that escapes his mouth is an incoherent whimper.

“Peter…” Pepper calls again, the heels drawing close, but he can’t hold on any longer. He doesn’t need to: he’s safe.

Darkness overtakes his vision and he collapses onto the carpet.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Recovery! Woohoo!! (I'm posting this all at once and I'm rushing and my brain is frazzled so no funny quips for you guys right now I'm afraid)

The second Tony hits the floor, he wakes up.

Before even the throbbing of the back of his head, he notices the kid’s arms around him and recalls the last few minutes of his consciousness, the images of a blowtorch burning blue and of waxy crimson burns spidering across Peter’s face still horrifyingly fresh in his memory.

“Get a medical team to the front door right away,” he hears Pepper saying. Pushing himself hurriedly into a sitting position, Tony sees her crouched in front of them both, her widened eyes fixed on the kid.

The kid, whose every inch of skin is littered with bruises, lacerations, swelling, raised lines that look like whip marks. Who is gaunt and frail and half-naked and blue from cold.

“What should you expect, you asked? Cho, I don’t know what to say. He’s… everything. Just, every kind of injury you could think of.”

Tony has spent twenty sleepless nights looking for Peter Parker.

He’d first begun to suspect that something was amiss when he shut up his workshop for the night and realised he’d never received the quiet ping he’d programmed Karen to send which indicated that the kid had returned safely home from patrol. The protocol had been designed so Tony would get a ping from the Spider-Man suit the moment it entered the Parker abode, and, on the flip side, would send through an alert if he stayed out past his curfew, so the radio silence was what began to raise red flags.

Tony had shoved his paranoia aside for the moment and simply called the kid.

Nothing.

After three missed calls, he patched it straight through, the guilt of prying fading in comparison to a need to assure the kid’s safety, but FRIDAY had pulled him up short. “Boss, it is impossible for me to trace his phone or suit. They do not exist.”

“Sure, they exist. Be realistic, FRI. What do you mean?”

“The most likely explanation for this is that they have both been destroyed to the point where they no longer emit a tracking signal.”

Pushing out a deliberately measured breath, Tony ran his hands down his face in a habitual movement. “What are the chances he’s... destroyed all his tech and run off to join the Amish?”

“That is highly unlikely, Boss. Mister Parker spends an average of three hours on his phone every day.”

“Well - yeah. Shit.” Fighting back a growing wave of unease, Tony tried and failed to pull together some sort of plan of action which culminated in a tentative phone call to May Parker.

“If Peter’s with you right now and he hasn’t answered my texts,” she began without preamble, “You’re both in big trouble.”

Tony’s moment of silence drove her to an instant and terrifying conclusion.

“Tony, tell me he’s with you.”

“He’s off the grid. FRIDAY’s saying his suit and phone have been destroyed.”

“And what does that mean?”

“It means… I suppose we’re - we’re looking at a missing kid now.”

Tony remembers with harsh clarity the way May’s breath had caught.

“Fuck, Tony. He’s - that’s my  _ baby _ .”

“I know, May, I know. Best not to get - we don’t know anything for sure. There’s a best-case scenario here.”   
Neither of them are convinced. They’re both catastrophizers when it comes to Peter, and for good reason: the kid gets whammied by the ugliest parts of life on the daily.

“And the worst case?” May ventured.

Words fled Tony’s mouth.

“There’s a place at the facility upstate if that’s where you wanna be. I’ll kickstart a search there.”

The plastered-on bravery in May’s tone fractured a little as she affirmed, “I’ll be right there.”

Tony called the NYPD. He gathered Rhodey and Happy and Pepper and a team of specialist SI security employees. He scoured footage and followed leads himself, gave every piece of information he had to the cops, sent out teams of drones to survey as much of New York as he could until, five days later, Pepper laid her hands on his shoulders and told him, “If you don’t rest now you’re going to be useless.”

“He’s still out there, Pep.”

She simply smiled sadly at him and repeated, “If you don’t rest now you’re going to be useless.”

“I can’t just  _ rest _ .”

“Yes, you can. Come on.” She let him take her arm and guided him out of his chair as if he were fragile, ancient. “You’re going to take a hot bath. I’m going to warm up your favourite pyjamas. You’re going to take some sleeping pills, and I’ll be with you all night.”

“The kid needs me--”

“He does. He needs you to be strong, and to do that you have to sleep.”

“Make sure I’m up at five.”

“Six.”

“Five-thirty.”

As awful as it felt harbouring a head full of horrific images of what could be happening to the kid while he let his muscles unknot themselves in a tub of hot water, he awoke the next morning with renewed determination for his task.

Losing Peter was simply not an option.

“Whoever’s got him, they must know a lot,” May remarked over coffee as she watched Tony at work that morning. “To disconnect his suit, too.”

She left for a shift at the hospital a few hours later - as much as she wanted to be around during the search for Peter, her job didn’t allow her to take leave for her missing nephew, and she was determined to remain self-sufficient - but her statement stayed with Tony.

_ They must know a lot. _

When Tony stopped searching for a lone villain and started picturing a group - an organisation of some sort - the pieces began to fit.

“Show me feed 4, the 2nd of February, at... 2 pm. One of the first drone searches I sent out, right?”

“That is correct,” FRIDAY chimed. “The feed begins just over a mile from this facility.”

And there it is. The small, ramshackle building by the freeway. He’d dismissed it at first as a broken-down shelter, but it’s too incongruous not to take a closer look now.

“Send in a scout. I want to see inside.”

Not a minute later, the miniature drone whirred through a chink in its wall and revealed a room that appeared completely unremarkable but for the circular trapdoor set into the centre of the floor. 

After ten minutes of studying that trapdoor, realisation - a thunderbolt from heaven, the eureka moment inventors like him grasp at all their lives - strikes him. He notices the design: a circle broken by a diagonal hinge on the bottom right.

“Bring up the Oscorp logo,” he demanded urgently.

An image flew to join the paused feed of the trapdoor. A circle broken at the bottom right.

_ Oscorp. _

Lunging for his phone, he patched a call through to Norman Osborn - how he came to store the fucker’s number, God only knows, but he was thankful for it then - and hoped his hunch was correct.

“You took the kid.”

“It took you long enough to figure it out,” Osborn had returned with a short bark of laughter.

As he takes in the state of Peter all over again in the doorway of the Compound, he wishes he’d killed Osborn personally. Painfully. Made him feel every inch of pain the kid must have gone through.

The  _ kid _ . The kid he’d taken out for ice cream on his sixteenth birthday last summer. The kid whose screams are still freshly ringing through Tony’s mind.

He hovers his hands over the motionless body beside him, searching for somewhere to make contact with that won’t hurt the kid. 

“Fucking hell, he just - we’re - he  _ walked _ all the way back.”

Pepper ends her call and immediately looks to him, gaping, her composure discarded. “What the hell happened?”

“I found the place,” he blurts. “Tried to get him out, but I must’ve knocked my head. He… took us back.”

There’s a moment of stunned silence.

“You should get May on the line,” Tony says, trying to clear a path through his jostled brain. It throbs, but his heart aches more acutely.

Pepper just nods, rushing to find the number.

Swallowing away the breaks in his voice, he tugs off his jacket, shakes away the coating of dust from the explosion, and lays it across the kid’s back. He seems even smaller under it, like he’s shrinking by the minute to a shell of what Tony remembers him to be. Unwilling to gather him up and risk aggravating any of his injuries, Tony takes hold of one of his hands: there’s a litany of half-healed scrapes marring the knuckles, but all the fingers look to be in their proper place, which he can’t say the same of about the other.  _ God. _ “Kiddo, are you awake? Can you try and open your eyes? I just - we’ve just gotta know you’re all good.”

“May, he’s here,” Pepper says. “We have - no, I’m sorry. He’s not awake. Just - come.”

Tony brings the limp knuckles to his cheek, then his chest. “Look, it’s okay to wake up now. Here’s my janky heartbeat. You always recognize it, remember?” He laughs hysterically, tearfully. Tony Stark is on the verge of tears. “We’ve got a team coming - they’re gonna get you on the good stuff, yeah? Stuff kids your age pay hundreds for. Lucky punk.”

Inexplicably, the kid’s eyelids choose that moment to begin dragging themselves open.

“Oh. Kid? Pete?”

Peter’s face screws up the moment he wakes; he groans, a dreadfully tormented noise.

In his peripheral vision, Tony spots the elevator doors opening to allow out an assemblage of medics.

“You’re okay, kid - it’s me, it’s your Mister Stark, yeah? We’re gonna get you all fixed up.”

“M’s… s’k,” Peter garbles.

“Uh-huh,” Tony assents, although he hasn’t a clue what the kid is trying to tell him.

His gaze is brimming with exhaustion, anguish, pain, a host of harrowing emotions that Tony doesn’t ever want to see there again, but through it all shines trust.

As the medics set down their equipment, he squeezes Peter’s hand and receives a slight twitching of the kid's fingers in response. Encouraged, he prepares to make full use of his skills in comforting monologues. “You’re gonna get lifted onto a gurney in just a second so we can get you tucked up in a bed and fixed up. Sounds good, doesn’t it?”

Peter whines, long and low and broken. After Tony had watched him rein in his response to pain in the white tiled corridor - the fierce, guarded demeanour he’d taken upon him - he reckons the kid deserves to cry out as much as he wants. He must hurt like hell.

Tony can feel it.

He keeps his hand locked around Peter’s as the medical team lifts him onto the gurney on his stomach, the kid locking his gaze on him as if his life depends on it. As he’s carried back towards the elevator, Tony jogs beside him. “And we’re off on a magical adventure to the MedBay,” he jests feebly. One side of Peter’s mouth actually lifts a little. “Get ready to sleep for a decade. I know you’ll love that. No more getting up at the crack of dawn to take the subway, doctor’s orders.”

The elevator takes them briskly upwards, but to Tony it still isn’t fast enough. Through his tirade of falsely-chipper reassurance, the medical team makes a cursory assessment of his injuries and responsivity.

“Your aunt is on her way. She’ll be here real soon, so expect a lot of kisses. From me, too. If that’s alright.”

“Sir, we need you to clear the room while we prep for surgery.”

“Oh.” They’re in an operating room, he realises dimly. “Yes.”

Although it tears at his primal protective instincts, Tony knows he has to step away for the kid’s ultimate wellbeing. Hysterics in the OR will do nothing to ease the process along.

Laying a hand over the crown of Peter’s matted hair, he tries to imbue his own strength into the kid through his touch, though all he’s got at the moment seems to be an overload of frenzied determination.

“Be brave for me, Pete,” he whispers.

There’s an affirmation of his request in Peter’s eyes, he thinks.

He steps away; the doors glide shut before him.

“Well, fucking hell,” he remarks to Pepper who he hears approaching behind him.

“Yes, fucking hell. Do you want to explain why you were passed out and slung over the kid’s shoulder?”

“I found where they’d kept him. Well, I didn’t know for sure, I just… I’m sorry. It was a gut instinct. Couldn’t slow down if there was a chance it was the right lead.”

“Who was it?”

“Oscorp. They brought him to me, and - God - they, he was…” his headache arrives in full force, half-knocking him off his feet with the sudden dizziness that accompanies it. “Maybe we can talk about this after I’ve got some Tylenol in me. Pretty sure I’ve got a concussion.”

“Okay.” Caring Pepper returns. “Let’s get you checked out, too.”

\---

Peter opens his eyes to white tiles.

The pain he’d felt so potently the last time he’d been awake has dimmed significantly, leaving him with dull aches; a mattress cushions his smarting back. It’s heavenly, almost unreal.

“They said he’d only be out for an hour or two, right?”

“It doesn’t mean anything’s wrong, May. He’s just exhausted.”

It’s the familiar voices that bring him back to reality, that cement sweet relief in his heart.

Rolling his head to one side, he finds May attached to his hand.

May.  _ May. _ May who smells of freshly-washed scrubs and orchids and home. 

He flexes his fingers in hers and she startles, pressing her lips together in a trembling smile. “Peter, baby.  _ Peter. _ ”

At the affection in her words, a bright golden thing deep in his chest that has been left neglected in a white tiled corner for twenty-one days flares to life, thawing, easing him.

He attempts to turn his head the other way but finds a wad of gauze across the side of his head that prevents him from seeing all of Tony. He spots the elbows resting on his mattress, the downturned countenance harbouring something deep and raw.

Grief settles heavily in the room. Peter’s had enough of grief.

“Tha’ was,” he tries through his numb mouth, “Tha’ w’s a trip. An’ all I got w’s… was this…” He attempts to indicate himself with a hand but finds the arm that isn’t enclosed in May’s hand trapped by a sling and a number of casts.

Like the force of gravity has suddenly been applied to him and he’s hit the ground with a thud, Peter remembers the snap of those bones breaking, the wordless screams nobody had heeded, the bloodstains that had tarnished undulating white tiling, and feels a painful lump well up in his throat. 

“I d’n’t even ge’ an’thing.” 

A tear races unbidden down his cheek. 

“That w’s a lousy joke. ’m sorry.”

The lamentation trapped within him has been caught behind his sternum for twenty-one days; now that it’s beginning to escape, it’s impossible to stop.

Peter swallows. Another tear falls, sinking into the gauze across his face.

“Hey,” May murmurs soothingly to him, “What’s up, sweetheart?”

_ Everything. _

“Forgot how nice y’ were, May,” he tells her, trying to distract from his crying, trying to smile. The gauze and the numbness of the side of his face gets in the way. “Ev’ryone’s real nice ou’ here. Y’ were - m'ster St’rk, y’ came?”

“I did,” he receives in reply. He’s never seen his mentor look so wrecked.

It’s not every day he returns from a kidnapping, he supposes.

“‘M - ‘m back.” He feels as if he needs to say it aloud to solidify it.

“Yes, you are.” May brushes a fond hand across his hair, tucking away his still-dirty bangs. The touch is more tentative than her usual calming gestures, but she offers him a smile that, although plastered on, holds at least a fragment of genuine positivity. “Everyone’s very happy about that, you know.”

His mind turning to the days at school he never attended, the unanswered texts in his phone, the life he’d left behind, Peter tips his head back restlessly. “Di’ Ned… we were g’na…”

“He handled your World History presentation,” May says with a huff of laughter that is mirrored by Mister Stark. “Don’t you worry about it.”

“Goo’. Prou’ of him.” He is. He misses him and MJ like hell.

May’s countenance affects stern incredulity, although she can never muster up any real discipline while he’s bebound. Peter has learnt this through a long period of trial and error where, after engaging in some form of stupid behaviour, she’d always wait until he was back on his feet to grill him out. With the state he’s in now, he guesses it will take a while this time. She chuckles wetly at him. “You walked yourself all the way back here, you crazy boy.”

Peter takes another hazy stab at lifting the mood: “Crazy, ‘s m’ - uh, my…”

“Middle name?” supplies Mister Stark, subdued.

“Mm. M’ middle name.”

The crease in his mentor’s brow sets off a warning pang in his chest. 

“M’ster St’rk?”

“Yeah, kid?”

“Is ev’rythin’ all, uh…” his brain and mouth won’t work together to produce the words he wants. “All, all, um.”

Tony seems to sense the root of his concern. “You’re safe. I made sure of it myself. Multiple times. We have those guys handled, I promise.” He rests a hand on Peter’s knee, pats it a few times, but he gets the feeling that he’s holding back from doing something as intimate as wiping tears from where they’ve halted, quivering, in the hollows of his eye sockets. In a quiet corner of his mind, Peter wishes he would. 

“Oh. ‘kay.”

He can’t quite bring himself to believe it.

\---

The next time he wakes up, he’s gained a new level of coherence that leads him to take stock of the state he’s in. The dressing on his face feels damp but cool with whatever they’ve used to treat the burns. The burns he doesn’t want to think about. 

There’s a splint and a layer of gauze across his nose to reset it; a cast on his hand, one on his forearm, and a sling holding the whole arm at a 90-degree angle. It alleviates the burning pain he’d barely even processed in his collarbone. He can feel a dressing across the lashes on his back, too, and an ice pack laid across his swollen ribs over the hospital gown he’s now dressed in. He’s free from a cannula, thankfully; there are just two IV lines trailing from the crook of his arm and the back of his hand respectively.

_ God, I’m a mess. _

It’s certainly the most wiped-out he’s ever felt. His eyelids are ten-tonne weights.

The trouble comes when May offers him a plastic cup upon noticing his return to consciousness. “Do you want a couple of ice chips, honey?”

_ “Would you like some clothes?” _

Peter’s heart picks up the pace.

“Uh, I - I don’ know.”

“You don’t know?” May presses, brows knitting, and he’s letting her down. She wants an answer.

“Wha’s, wha’s gonna happ’n?” he asks tremulously, recalling the thump of a whip descending on his back, the echoes of his own screams accompanied by the sickening cracking of bones, a million hands pressing him to the ground, and simply needing to know that he’s safe from it.

He  _ is  _ safe. He knows that. But a more primal part of him is terrified.

“What do you mean, baby? Are you feeling okay?”

From his accustomed place at Peter’s right side, Tony leans forward in his seat and interjects. “Hey, is this something to do with…?”

Peter isn’t sure why he says it. It just comes out. “T’ earn wha’ I need, I gotta take punishmen’.”

There’s an ugly silence. Tony sets a hand over Peter’s ankle; Peter can pick up the tremors in his grip. May chews on her lower lip. 

“Kid,” Tony says quietly.

“‘M sorry, it just… that’s wha’ they said. I know ‘s not… bu’, uh, yeah. Sorry.”

“Hey, it’s fine.” Tony frowns good-naturedly, signalling a Mister Stark-patented statement on the way, and sure enough: “I don’t want to hear the word  _ sorry  _ out of your mouth for at least a month.”

It’s familiar, comforting, and helps Peter ground himself in the room, the hospital bed, the safe place. 

He smiles wonkily at Mister Stark. “Y’know tha’s unrealistic.”

“Seriously, kid, are you gonna take the ice chips?” is the amusement-tinged response. Tony nods towards the cup now set down on the overbed table, his countenance radiating a schooled softness. “No strings attached, that’s a guarantee.”

“Sure,” Peter blusters, shrugging then regretting it as his collarbone is struck with a stabbing pain. “‘kay.”

May pushes a few chips into his mouth, softly pushing away his good hand, which he notices is weighed down by fatigue and more spindly than the last time he’d been in the MedBay. Almost a month of starvation does that to you, he guesses.  The ice chips are heavenly against his arid throat.

“Is that how you got all banged up?” Tony inquires softly, re-igniting the previous thread of conversation, and although it unearths the reel of harrowing memories that blemish his recent past, something in Peter yearns to tell Mister Stark, to show him that he’d tried his best, even if it doesn’t appear that way.

He’d gotten captured, kidnapped, and absolutely  _ wrecked _ , and he’d just waited around until Mister Stark had come to save him. Whether Oscorp was involved or not, it fosters a rankling sense of shame in his gut.

_ If you’re nothing without the suit, then you shouldn’t have it. _

“Tony,” May hisses.

Peter nods anyway, the rustling dressing over his face irritating him. “Yeah.” He searches for Tony’s gaze, injects sincerity into his garbled speech. “I didn’ wanna ask f’r anything an’ I made it five days wi’out water. Bu’... I had to.”

“Course you did,” Mister Stark tells him with a startling level of empathy.

“I tried t’ be smart,” Peter continues, “S’ they wouldn’ hurt me t’ much.”

“Pete, I’m not grading you on how well you handled yourself in there. Relax. You got out, that’s all that matters.”

“You go’ me out,” mutters Peter.

The crow’s feet lining Mister Stark’s eyes deepen. “Same difference,” he affirms.

But it isn’t.

“Di’ you hear me, May?” he finds himself saying, blinking away a haze of rumination from his vision.

“What?”

“I called you in there, y’ know.”

The feel of the vintage telephone he’d wished into being is somehow more concrete than the real memories of pacing the floor and sleeping on the ceiling and not-crying and crawling when he became too weak to stand and screaming to a helpless Mister Stark as fire licked the side of his face.

“You - there was a phone?” May asks quizzically. She’s trying her very best to understand him, Peter knows, to listen to him and fix any problem he voices, to make it all better. It’s him who’s all over the place. 

“No. There wasn’ anything. Just tiles. Bu’ I pretended. Thought y’ might hear anyway.”

His remark breaks something in May. With a sharp inhale, she pushes back her chair and stands, looking anywhere but at Peter, at the casts and dressings and stitches that hold him together. “You know what?” she says loudly, “I’m gonna - do you want a milkshake, Peter? I’m getting you a milkshake. Something nice to get you back to solid foods.”

She rakes a hand through her unwashed hair and leaves.

The mattress feels too soft for Peter now, dipping under his weight. He wallows in his own stupidity.

His memories are now too dark to share with May: she isn’t a superhero, just a woman who has lost her husband and who didn’t ask to be pulled into a world where she risks losing her nephew too. She didn’t ask to have another person to worry about, but here Peter is, breaking her heart. He almost wishes she didn’t care so ardently as she does, didn’t long so fruitlessly to protect him from the wear and tear of the superhuman world.

The silence between him and Mister Stark hangs heavily, riddled with tension and the shared recollection of Peter’s screams.

Only when Tony clears his throat and says, “I set you up a new phone,” is he pulled away from his thoughts.

“You di’?”

It’s tossed into his lap. “Go ahead and text your little Gen Z heart away.”

As hard as Peter tries to turn the device on and swipe over to his apps with his one uninjured hand, it just slips from his grip. His face reddens.

“M’ster S’rk?”

“Yuh-huh?” Mister Stark hasn’t yet noticed, having angled himself away from Peter a little and placed his head in his hands. At Peter’s sheepish call, he twists to face him again in a series of jerks. “Oh.” He lunges for the phone, newly sober. “Oh, yeah. How about I read everything out for you?”

In an instant, the notion of Mister Stark seeing all his texts manifests in all its horrifying glory, and Peter finds himself fearing something as trivial as the discovery of his awkward message history with MJ and nerdy conversations with Ned. It’s oddly relieving.

“Don’ spy on my texts,” he protests weakly. The blue light reflecting on Mister Stark’s face serves as a blatant reminder that his mentor might just be betraying him already.

Tony smirks. “I can’t  _ not _ spy on them if they’re right there.”

Peter lets out a huff that he hopes conveys the entirety of his indignance, although he’s aware the side of his face that’s free of dressings probably doesn’t create a very threatening image.

“There you are,” Tony chuckles in the face of his display, “I was waiting for that little frown.”

“‘M not little.”

“If you say so, pipsqueak.”

Peter rolls his eyes as dramatically as he can. “Jus’ let me talk t’ Ned ‘nd MJ.”

“Video call?” Mister Stark suggests as if he hasn’t yet noticed the way Peter’s face must look.

The thought of his friends seeing the human punching bag he’s become cuts a sense of horror in him too deep for the lightness of the interaction he’s engaged in.

“No, no, no,” he rushes to say before hurriedly covering his panic with a languid shake of his head. “No calls. Text.”

“And you’re gonna dictate them to me like I’m a medieval scribe?”

“I dig tha’.” Peter finds himself letting out a short bark of laughter despite himself. He’s a melting pot of emotion, experiencing everything at once.

“I resent that,” retorts his mentor lightly.

“Suck i’ up, M’ster S’rk. ‘m an invalid, y’ gotta do what I say.”

Tony just swallows. Peter hopes he didn’t say the wrong thing again.

“Di’ Ned say anything?” he prompts eventually.

“A great many things. Forty-two, in fact.”

“Oh, man.” Just the thought of  _ forty-two things _ makes his head spin. Ned probably went out of his mind. “Don’ think I c’d process tha’ right now. Jus’... tell him I’m alrigh’. ‘M alive an’ he can finish the Imperial S’r Destroyer wi’out me.”

“The Imperial Star Destroyer?” echoes Mister Stark, a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth.

Peter remembers the enthusiasm he used to hold for things like this. He tries hollowly but valiantly to recreate that excitement as he replies: “‘S got four thousan’, seven h’ndred an’ eighty four pieces, M’ster St’rk. Isn't tha’ crazy?”

His mentor’s eyes crinkle amiably as he regards Peter, shifting back a little in his seat as if the levity has physically purged some of his stress. “You built all of that?”

“We w’re gonna,” shrugs Peter.

“He’s typing already. It’s… I have to break it to you, Pete, but his fine motor skills seem to have declined significantly in the time you were gone.”

“Wha’ do y’ mean?”

“It’s just a string of random letters.”

“He’s keyb’rd smashin’, M’ster St’rk,” Peter giggles, ignoring the rasp of his throat.

Tony clicks his tongue. “I won’t even ask.”

Making an attempt to lean upwards in his bed and towards the glow of the screen in Mister Stark’s hands which is quickly aborted by the ache of his ribs and back, Peter urges, “Wha’s he sayin’ now?”

“I think I made out a  _ holy shit  _ somewhere in there…  _ I’m gonna kill you, I thought you were dead _ …  _ No, I am not finishing the Destroyer without you _ …”

Peter smiles.

“ _ What happened? _ With an abundance of question marks.” Raising his eyeline with a dip of his brows, Tony studies him for a moment.

“Tell him i’ was S’ider-Man stuff an’ I got in trouble but ‘m alrigh’,” Peter tells him as firmly as he can.

“You’re not gonna tell him?”

“He’ll stress ou’.”

Setting aside the phone in favour of lacing his fingers together atop his lap, Tony sighs, heralding a lecture to come. “Kid, I won’t lie to you,” he says with surprising softness, “Not everything just goes away once you’re back in the world. Some things never do. You - you know that, right? You’re prepared for that?”

At that very moment, Peter is saved by the bustling entrance of May, who sets a creamy drink before him and smiles hopefully. “I got you salted caramel.”

“Th’nk you so much, May.” Inexplicably, it’s the drink, the way his enhanced senses pick up the rich, sugary smell and the slow bleeding of caramel syrup into the milky base, which rekindles passion in Peter, infuses a little color into his world. He lifts his hand until it rests on her arm, too weak to raise it further, and she sets her hand a little awkwardly but with sincerity over his. 

“S’lted caramel’s the bes’.”

“I know, honey.” Returning his smile shakily, she squeezes his hand and tells him, “Now, I want you to enjoy it, okay? It’s - it’s your first...”

Where she trails off, he picks up. “My firs’ drink back in the real w’rld.”

May nods, blinking fiercely. Everything Peter does seems to upset her. So he shuts up and latches on to the straw of the drink.

It’s mind-blowingly good. It’s cool and thick and delicious and makes him feel a whole lot better.

“Can I swear?” he pipes up out of the blue. “Jus’ once?”

Mister Stark indulges him. “Go on.”

“H’ly  _ fuck _ , I’ve missed s’lted caramel.”

\---

Peter tried to escape. He did.

The second time he heard the rhythmic beat of boots nearing his cell, he leapt up onto the wall right beside the door, flattening himself against the tile in the hope that the masked group would be taken by surprise by his sudden attack. With nothing but unbridled terror on his side, he prepared to take out four armed guards who had wrestled him easily to the floor the day before.

The force of the group was unneeded, it transpired. As soon as Peter threw his first weakened punch, the room filled with the torturous whistle, making him drop to the floor in shock.

“Would you like anything?” he was asked mildly after the noise had ceased at last. 

From his sprawled position on the floor, hands still covering his ringing ears, Peter shook his head vehemently. “No. Please, go away.”

White tiles spun with the dizzying motion of a carousel before his vision, the cacophony of retreating boots at odds with the thousands of dismembered feet he sees tramping across the unidentifiable orb of the cell. Peter bit back a cry of pain as the slam of the door assaulted his ears, rocking his head back and forth, back and forth, losing himself in the distracting motion.

His swallows became avalanches, blinking like the shutter of a camera pressed against his eyes.

“Oh, man,” he mumbled unevenly, nausea creeping up his throat. “Pull yourself together, Peter. Come on. Just - chill.”

It wasn’t the first time his senses had overloaded. The bout of sickness after the spider bite; his first overwhelming patrol; a school day he’d attended on a single hour of sleep; all had brought about these almost familiar symptoms. But before, he could crawl between his sheets, relaxing in the familiar scent of his room, and call it a day. He could stumble through his day in sunglasses and headphones, knowing it would pass. He could even lock himself in the dark, soundproofed room in the Compound - the isolation room - and shut out every sensation but his own breath and heartbeat. In his box, there was nothing to distract him from the frightening lack of control that came with the sensory overload but his own sheer willpower.

So he continued to rock back and forth for what could have been hours, simply waiting for the storm to pass by.

\---

Peter wakes to a sweat-soaked hospital gown and a lump in his throat.

Sucking in a raw breath, he takes in the room: Tony stirring at his side and May passed out at his other. Nothing out of the ordinary. He burns all over, however, damp and shaky and aching.

“Kid?” Tony mutters, righting himself and rubbing at his eyes.

“Mister St’rk, I gotta go t’ the isolation room,” he blurts.

That gets Mister Stark up quickly. He takes in Peter’s taut face, his good hand clenched in the sheets, the beads of moisture at his hairline, and nods.

The transferral from his bed to a wheelchair is awkward and excruciating, with Tony struggling to bundle his fragile limbs and IV lines safely into the seat while Peter shuts his eyes against the red-hot pokers of Tony’s hands on him and the shifting of the synthetic overhead lights against his skull and the jostling of his arm and back and ribs and face.  _ It’s worth it _ , he tells himself. Just a few minutes and there will be blissful silence.

“Nightmare?” Tony asks him in a hushed tone as he wheels him down corridors and into the lift.

“Flashback, I th’nk.”

Tony’s hand settles in his slick curls; he wordlessly combs them out, his touch feather-light, and it’s a welcome distraction from the deafening creaking of the cables around them.

Guiding him and his IV stand into the darkened room, he half-shuts the door and breathes, “Anything you need, give FRIDAY a command, remember? She won’t make any noise. I’ll come and get you out when you’re ready.”

“Thank you,” he whispers, his brain rattling with the volume. 

The door is eased shut, leaving only blissful quiet.

Blissful for a short while, anyway.

Peter has never loved the isolation room. As helpful as it is to rebalance his senses, the very name reminds him of why it scares him -  _ isolation _ . Now, bound to his wheelchair, hearing only his own heartbeat, all he can think of are the days in his cell wracked with pain too great to allow him to move but also gripped by terrible loneliness.

The fear of being alone has dogged him all his life. Re-starting his life without his parents. Watching Ben bleed out on the ground before him. Floundering under the weight of the collapsed warehouse. Never was it more starkly exposed, however, than the twenty-one days he’d spent in his box.

He’d been scared. He could have rotted there forever, his last breath plagued by the loneliness he’d fought so hard to run from.

“FRIDAY,” he gasps, “Get me ou’ of here.”

Tony comes rushing through, concern clear on his face, but Peter wants nothing more than to cling to him and never let go, so he does just that, clutching him until he grunts at the pain radiating from his ribs.

“Kid, I’m here. You’re fine.”

“Didn’ work,” he says into Tony’s shoulder.

“I know.” Mister Stark’s voice brims with sadness. “It’s okay, let’s just - take a breather for a minute. Sit here.”

“Can’ do much else,” huffs Peter.

They rest, Mister Stark breathing into Peter’s hair while he keeps his hand stuck stubbornly to his mentor’s back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Any and all support is appreciated :)  
> My tumblr: notaparty-trick


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here is the final installment :) now I can sleep for a thousand years!

“What would you like?”

Peter tried not to cry. “Blanket.” 

He’d warred back and forth all night, worrying himself to pieces over the possibility of a little extra warmth. Asking for it felt like admitting nobody would come to rescue him. But his fingers and toes were blue.

“Please don’t hurt me,” he found himself begging as he was thrust onto the floor on his stomach, jarring his misshapen hand. Though he knew it was utterly useless, the words spilled forth from a well of fear in his mind without filter. “I didn’t do anything, I just wanna go home.  _ Please _ .”

At the first smack of the whip against his back, the breath was driven from his lungs.

Peter gasped in a shuddering breath, writhing at the unbearable burning sensation that immediately enveloped him. 

The second had him moaning in agony.

The third, fourth, fifth, had him pleading.

“Stop, please, don’t touch me,” he sobbed. “I - I don’t want the blanket.”

The sixth followed all the same.

Peter remembered the History class where he’d seen on the page of his textbook the image of ‘Whipped Peter’, the awful scarring across his back, like something had eaten into him.

He cried at the irony of that name.

His skin broke at the tenth lash. He screamed.

\---

“God, oh, God, oh - _ shit! _ ”

“May, don’t take his hand. He’ll crush it.”

“C’mon, baby boy. You’re strong. You got this.”

“Hurts,” Peter hiccups, bracing himself for the agony of the wound cleaning substance against his ruined back.

“I know, kid. Just a little while longer.”

A team of nurses has him on his side, hospital gown untied to reach the web of welts at his back, restraining him so his reflexive flinches don’t worsen his injuries. His heart pounds. 

“O- _ oh _ , crap,” he falters, pulling at the burns on his face as he screws it up instinctually. The shower he’d been assisted in taking just hours ago has been made superfluous by the sweat that’s breaking out all over him, brought on partly by the sheer torture of the procedure and partly by recollections of being held down and made to cry out in pain in his box.

“Deep breaths,” Tony reminds him softly from where he and May are crouched right beside him, inches away but forbidden from touching him until his wounds are cleaned and re-dressed. 

Peter obliges, pushing out a rasping breath. His vision is too blurry to make out Mister Stark’s expression. 

The burn arrives again, too quickly, too overwhelmingly, and he jerks against the hands keeping him in place. “No, sto’, too much!”

“We’re very nearly finished, Peter--”

Mister Stark rises from his seat in an instant. “He told you to  _ stop _ .”

The pain recedes, leaving a residual sting, and a few shuffling footsteps sound behind Peter. He drags his face across the mattress of his bed, hoping to scrub away the tear tracks there but mostly just increasing the throbbing in his nose.

Then a calloused hand is in his hair, a softer one gracing a thumb over his forearm, and he sags in relief.

“You’re okay, Pete, you’re okay,” comes Tony’s low murmur, but he’s not.

“Th’nk you,” he breathes all the same.

“Nobody does anything without your consent, okay?” There again is the fierce yet uneven tone that Peter can’t decipher while the phantom lash of the whip still rings with harsh clarity in the back of his mind.

“’m good now. Jus’… get it over with.”

“You can keep taking a break.”

“No, I gotta do i’.”

Almost the moment the comforting hands leave him, the pain ramps up again, albeit only for a few seconds before a clean dressing is applied.

Peter knows what comes next.

A plastic tub held in a stand is wheeled to a stop beside the burned side of his face, lukewarm water tossing a washcloth back and forth inside. The nurse who had positioned it wrings out the cloth a little, steadies a gloved hand on an unharmed section of his head, and gingerly presses the wet cloth to the dressing just as Peter lets out a forcefully measured exhale.

_ He feels his flesh melting. _

_ No.  _ He shuts out the memory with gritted teeth.

This isn’t even the worst part. The worst part is after the dressing has been soaked enough that it peels off, when the cream is washed off and replaced. 

Peter had stupidly presumed that the moment he staggered through the door of the Compound would be the moment his pain would end.

This time, he can’t even move his face, although every nerve in his body begs him to turn away from the razor blades of the washcloth against his raw skin.

“ _ Mff! _ ” he cries instead, his empty hand fisting in the sheets.

“Good job,” he hears May coaxing over his outbursts. “You’re doing amazing, baby.”

The truth is far from her reassurances. He’s whimpering like an idiot. Pain is a thousand times harder to cope with now, and with a superhero side gig like his, it scares him to contemplate how much harder it might become now.

If he ever heals enough to get out of bed, that is.

As the new dressing is being prepared, a morbid part of him speaks. “I w’nna see my face.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Tony’s head fall forward into his hands. “Kiddo.”

“Show me,” he insists with all the shaky determination he can muster.

Both May and Mister Stark’s heads remained bowed as Tony taps a few times on his phone to enable the camera app and angles it towards Peter’s face.

Peter’s horrifying, ravaged,  _ broken  _ face.

He hadn’t even noticed that a patch of his hair had been singed off by the blowtorch and a further area shaved to a blunt stubble to bare the flayed brown edges of half-healed scalds. Like a disease that’s taken over his features, scraps of angry red, fragile pink and near-white mark the skin of his chin all the way up past his forehead. The dark pools of his eyes only point out more severely the bright, unnatural colours that ring them. Flecks of blood stand out at the palest areas.

Unable to articulate the gaping well of dismay that tears into him at the sight of himself, Peter lets out a sound between an exhale and a sob.

“You look just fine,” May rushes to tell him.

“Plus, you have  _ super healing _ , remember? It’ll clear up real fast.”

At Mister Stark’s remark, Peter meets the eye of the man he gained the scars to see, simply staring at him. Tony’s face drops its false veneer of encouragement.

He doesn’t blame Mister Stark, not at all. He had no idea. But the more primal part of him, the part that boils over with rage, with shame, with despair, wants desperately to blame  _ someone _ .

His disfigurement is the price of his freedom. It’s not fair. Not one other person in the room with him now has had to pay for the return of their own autonomy.

_ Except…? _

The hot, stinging trail of a liquid down his cheek startles him out of his rumination. “S’mthin’ on my face.”

“Hey, he’s - yeah.” Mister Stark frowns even more deeply as a nurse dabs at Peter’s face with gauze. “It just comes out? That’s alright?”

“Wha'?”

“You’re bleeding a little, kid.”

“It’s nothing out of the ordinary,” the nurse assures them.

Peter feels nauseous.

When the medical team finally leaves him alone, he trades trembling exhaustion for the murky arms of sleep, passing out in a mess of IV lines and broken limbs and sweat.

May is the first to sit back in her chair with a vehement, “Shit.”

Tony realises he’s forgotten to breathe again in the way he seems to regularly forget basic human functions at the moment. Dragging in a pained breath, he shakes out his twitching hands and echoes, “Shit.”

Above their weary heads whine artificial squares of light. Tony blinks against their harshness, the white behind his eyelids recalling a light with the harshness of the sun against the kid’s cheekbone.

“When I became Peter’s guardian,” begins May quietly, “I knew he had a number of health conditions. I knew there would be hospital visits, examinations - I knew I’d have to see him suffer. But I never - I had no idea. Never  _ this _ . This was never a thought, this… why do you think they did it?”

“It was because of me, I think,” grits Tony, eyes fixed on the floor.

“Tony - what?”

“When I -  _ God _ .” The words are razor-edged, nauseating, painful to force out. “They brought him out to me, and then they - he looked like he knew what was coming. That’s when they burnt him.”

Curling into herself, May presses the back of her hand to her mouth. “Fuck.”

“He said - he told us he took punishment, right? And then they’d let him have things? Food, water, a blanket--”

“You,” May finishes for him, sombre.

Tony screws his hand into a fist and brings it down jarringly on his knee. “I was such an idiot. Just waltzed on in there - no plan - no backup - no thought of what they might do to the kid.”

May’s expression begins to change then, morphing into a look she’s seen directed at Peter countless times, the look reserved for flareups of self-sacrificial complexes. “Tony, you--”

“I couldn’t have known, sure. But I  _ could’ve _ . That’s the thing.” 

These thoughts have plagued him from the moment he declared the kid missing. 

A pail of filthy water, his face jerked forward to meet it. Yinsen’s face inches from a glowing lump of coal. Sweat rising from his temples as he was screwed into a hulking metal suit that could have been his salvation or his downfall. And most of all, hand-trembling, muscle-knotting, mind-melting terror. Terror that the kid has lived with for twenty-one days. 

“I’ve been through it, May. I know what they do, the twisted way they think, and I could have thought about his safety for a  _ second _ instead of barging in there at the cost of--” he jerks a shoulder in Peter’s direction, his beaten, gauze-swathed body collapsed heavily atop his mattress. 

“You barged in because you were desperate,” May counters with fiery sincerity, tearing her gaze from the kid to search for Tony’s eyes. “Because you  _ love _ him. You had a chance to get him out and you couldn’t pass it up.”

Tony gestures to Peter again, failing to paper over the breaks in his voice as he says, “That isn’t love.”

“But you didn’t do that to him.”

“It sure feels like I did.”

Both of them are aware of the sudden shift in the tone of their conversation; with a hardening of her face that Tony has seen a less intimidating version of on Peter’s face, she flattens her tone and pins him with her gaze. Tony doesn’t dare to interrupt the point she begins to make. “Okay, I can’t - it’s time to cut the bullshit, Tony. I will  _ not _ have you wallowing right now. I cannot handle it while my kid is still like this.”

Almost unbidden, her gaze strays again to Peter - Tony wonders if she’s worrying about the same things he is.  _ Will he ever heal completely? _

“We are going to  _ be strong for him _ , okay?” she continues as if she’d never faltered. “Forget about the things we could have done or changed. You’ll forget about the way you came to get him, forget about passing out on him. I’ll forget that I let my sixteen-year-old child beat up criminals and didn’t consider that one day somebody with a grudge might choose to act on it.”

“There’s no way that was your--”

“That’s easy to think when it’s not you. And it’s not the  _ point _ .” 

May is filled with a grief-stricken, worn-down kind of wisdom just then. It flows from fidgeting fingers and lashes clumped together by old tears; it grips Tony and doesn’t let him forget the words being spoken to him. 

“The point is that our kid is in a bad way, and we’re gonna be his pillars of strength. He is not going to worry one bit about how we’re feeling for once in his life. We’re gonna co-parent the shit out of this awful situation, and all three of us are gonna come out the other end, so help me God. I would prefer not to have to drag you behind me too.”

For a moment, Tony simply sits in stunned silence, marvelling at the fortitude of May Parker.

“How are you like this?” he says eventually, speaking his mind. “Why can’t I emulate your - what would Peter call it? Boss-ass parenting?”

“Because - and I’m just making an observation here - you flail around with your emotions and don’t know what the hell to do with them.” 

The dry remark is punctuated by a laugh. 

Abruptly, the intense sincerity of moments before gives way to Tony’ favourite coping mechanism: joking uselessly about anything and everything that comes his way. The levity eases the hearts of them both.

Raising his eyebrows, he sits back in the hard hospital chair and replies, “That’s bold of you to say.”

“So you acknowledge that I’m right.”

“Well, my own dad was more of an advocate for not having any emotions, so I feel like I’m doing alright.”

May just offers him an affirmative smile.

\---

“Sure you aren’t better off in the chair?”

“I’m fine,  _ mom _ ,” retorts Peter good-naturedly. “Besides, if I get tired, you can carry me back.”

There’s the sassy kid Tony loves.

Still, it’s not easy to watch said kid wobbling at a snail’s pace out of his room in the MedBay, his walking stick the only thing keeping from splattering across the floor.

“C’mon, bud, you’re killing me. At least lean on me.”

“No. I’d rather look like a grandpa than an invalid.”

Tony ends up dawdling uselessly behind the kid as he makes his determined, sluggish way towards the elevator.

It’s difficult to look at the kid and simply see Peter Parker anymore, searching past the arm casts and stitches and dressings and hospital gown and - although Tony hates to admit that it fazes him - the patchwork of burns across his face. He loves his kid to bits, no matter how messed up his face is. It’s the knowledge that, even unintentionally,  _ Peter has them because of him _ , that makes him falter every time he lifts his eyes to meet the kid’s.

But scars be damned, the look on his face when they make it outside and the sun falls across him is unbeatable.

Ever the motormouth, the kid is silent for once, a sigh purging itself from his chest instead as he squints into the dappled light. It eases just a few of the million knots pulling at Tony’s own sternum.

“How are you feeling, kiddo?” he eventually works up the courage to ask.

“Pretty boss, actually, for not keeling over yet. Didn’t think I’d make it all the way here.”

“I actually meant…”

“Oh. Right.” Instantly, a little of the childlike joy withdraws from Peter’ demeanour, and Tony kicks himself.

There’s another long stretch of comfortable silence while the kid, still gazing out at the open grassland, collects his thoughts, mouth opening and closing minutely. Tony has learned to allow space for this grace period rather than interrupt the kid as he so often used to do, finding that when he let Peter talk in his own time, work past his stammering, he’d come out with some really surprising stuff. Profound. Intelligent. Sweet.

“I guess I’ve felt worse. But, uh, I’ve felt better. It’s just… the world is still here, but it feels like it should have… changed.”

It’s a vague statement, but Tony understands. Staggering out of the shattered remains of his suit, finding the Afghanistan desert around him as undulating and brutally hot as ever, he found himself baffled that the landscape hadn’t undergone the same trauma as him. The rest of the world was no worse for wear while he’d been torn to shreds. He’d felt that the desert itself was mocking him.

“And that’s what I’m scared of most, I think. Everyone’s - you know, they’re just going about their lives like normal and I have another thing weighing me down. Most people don’t freak out when they’re asked, like, a normal question. But it’s questions that get me. That’s all they said to me. They’d ask me what I wanted, and if I agreed to have anything… that was it.

“They wanted - they were trying to make me break, I think. So either I’d… I don’t know, drive myself crazy in there, or refuse everything else they offered me until I… maybe. I don’t know. And I’d forget there were people outside who wanted me with them.”

Tony smiles solemnly.

“I never forgot. I didn’t wanna let go. But it’s like - it was almost easier in there.”

There’s a lifetime of suffering etched into the look that Peter fixes Tony with then, tinged with something that might just be guilt.

“I know that sounds… weird--”

“Not weird at all. I felt that too.”

“You - what?” It takes a few moments, but the knowledge he hadn’t thought to turn over in his mind presents itself to him eventually and he gapes. “Mister  _ Stark _ . Oh my God. You didn’t - I didn’t think about - you too?”

“Come to me with all your kidnapping queries,” Tony jokes flatly. Peter just widens his eyes.

The ensuing pause is tense. It’s broken by the appearance of a car near the entryway where they stand and a flinch at Tony’s side.

“What are they doing here?” the kid breathes, stricken.

Tony peers over at the opening car doors. “Who?”

He recognizes the kid’s friends, although he likes to pretend he doesn’t.

“It’s just Ted and Emma,” he says deliberately, but it doesn’t draw a laugh or even an acknowledgement from Peter, who appears frozen in place. “What, did you guys fall out over Snapchat? I thought they were nice.”

Swallowing fiercely, Peter turns on his heel and makes a swaying break for the doors.

“Kid!” Although at first he expects to have to run after him, Tony finds the kid is still so slow on his feet that he hardly has to move to address him. There’s no way he’ll even be through the foyer by the time his friends have reached - and after all he’d said about the people he loves getting him through his time in captivity, Tony had assumed he’d be a lot more excited to reunite with them.

It’s when Peter clumsily brings his cast-clad forearm up to cover his face that Tony makes sense of his reaction.

“They’re gonna see me, Mister Stark,” pleads the kid, hints of swollen red protruding from behind his wavering arm.

Although it twists at Tony’s heart to see the kid in such a vulnerable state and encourage him to remain in it, a more earnest chemical that sparks in his veins compels him to stand firm. “Yeah, they are, and it’s gonna be  _ fine. _ ”

“Peter!” comes an enthused shout from the approaching figures.

Stilling in indecision, Peter fixes his eyes on his walking stick, his white-knuckled grip on the handle. Tony simply waits for him to make a choice.

Ned makes it for him, sprinting over like lightning but halting abruptly a few feet in front of the kid, who eyes him with a face tautened by fear.

Tony sees Ned take in Peter’s appearance from top to toe. 

MJ joins him then, her deadpan veneer crumbling into horror-struck vulnerability as she beholds the brokenness of the once-mighty boy before her.

Peter ducks his head, hiding his expression behind a curtain of half-shaved hair. “I know,” he croaks.

There’s no reply for a long time. Then, as if he physically can’t contain his outburst any longer, Ned blurts, “ _ OhmyGodImissedyousomuchI’msogladyou’renotdead. _ ”

Jerking his head back towards his friend a little, Peter lets out a bark of laughter that he surprises himself with.

Tears rapidly filling his eyes, Ned says, “Can I hug you?”

Peter opens his broken arm gingerly. “Don’t cry, dude,” he replies as Ned approaches with overly-hesitant steps, “Gonna make me cry, and when I cry it’s all over.”

The moment of embrace is heralded by a shared damp inhale from them both. Ned settles his arms softly around Peter, who sinks into the embrace, unable to raise his arms to reciprocate but making up for it by burying his face in the shoulder of his friend.

“ _ Spider-Man trouble _ ?” Ned questions him.

Faintly, Tony hears the kid mumble, “Sort of. It was just… they took me. Some bad guys.”

“You could have just told us, you dumbnut,” chips in Michelle, a telltale falter in the undertone of her own words, and goes to join the hug, looping her slender arms around both Peter and Ned. 

Tony can’t help but smile at the sight. The kid does have good friends.

“Didn’t want you to freak out,” mutters Peter. 

Ned pulls away a little with a frown. “We were freaked out enough,” he insists fervently, “We could take it.”

“ _ He  _ was freaked out to the max,” MJ adds, her trademark smirk ghosting her face for a moment. “ _ I _ was cool about it.”

The kid isn’t comforted, however; Tony catches the gossamer-like glint of a tear racing down the unharmed side of his face. “It’s not just - I’m, I’m all screwed up now.”

“You’re fine. You’re still Peter.” 

Michelle draws him back into the hug, three sets of teenage arms interlinking, comforting one another, all plagued by suffering yet lifting one another up. A string of shaky sniffing noise emanates from where Tony can only guess Peter’s head is nuzzled, but it doesn’t worry him. In fact, he’s comforted by them. He knows the kid, can pick apart the different ways he releases emotion, and these tears signify relief.

It’s almost a minute before the group embrace is broken. Peter raises his head, face paler than when it had disappeared, and says, “Sorry - uh, guys, I gotta sit down.” Tony is baffled to find he’ll let Ned and MJ wrap their arms around him and help him back towards the doors although he’d been so adamant that Tony wasn’t permitted to do the same.

It leaves him idling by the entrance as they retreat, forgotten by the trio of single-track teenage minds heading towards Peter’s hospital room, but he finds himself remarkably unbothered. In fact, his heart is set at rest to such an extent at the sight of the three of them that he waits to follow them back to the MedBay, instead wandering a few steps further from the entrance of the Compound and inhaling the dewy scent of the day.

He’s just glad to see Peter healing.

\---

The walking stick is only in active use for roughly a week before the kid’s back and ribs are well on their way to healing and he’s progressed to solid foods, beginning to gain the weight he’d dropped while captive. Usually, his healing might work at a faster rate, but malnutrition got him good. The freaky super-healing of old days resetting bones and staunching minor wounds after the kid’s patrols is only just now making a re-appearance, now the hollowness of Peter’s face is filling with colour again, now wiry muscle is re-threading itself along limbs that had looked fragile enough to snap with bare hands, now there is a hint of a spark punctuating his irises.

Tony, on the other hand, feels like he’s coming out of all this the worse for wear. The damn kid is going to give him a medical condition one day, he’s convinced. If he hasn’t already.

Recovery isn’t linear, it’s a hot mess. Tony knows this well. 

Peter cries in his assisted shower, then laughs uncontrollably for a straight minute at a meme MJ sent him while Tony is still drying his hair. He makes requests with distrust, then disquiet, then false confidence. He lets in visitors at last, lighting up from the inside out as he reunites with Pepper and Happy and Rhodey and hobbles out to the SI team that had helped find him to ramble out profuse thanks, then physically wilting when he returns to his room. His casts are sawed off. His hair begins to grow back. He eats his first meal. He cries at dinner. He has a nightmare. He begs to return to school, then begs not to the next morning. He stops writing halfway through a sheet of catchup Physics questions and stands at the Compound’s balcony blankly until Tony fetches him down. He remains blank and unresponsive for three days and nights before bursting back to life in a fit of tremors and tears and panic, then sags back in the arms of Tony and May and sleeps for a solid sixteen hours.

Now, he lies atop a jumble of cushions on the roof of the Compound, Tony at his side, and watches darkness bleed into the sky’s canopy.

Silence pervaded their walk towards the spot, and it pervades now. The gradual brightening of the crescent moon tells more for the moment than Tony’s words could, setting the tips of Peter’s eyelashes alight, spilling a pale wash of light across the fields that fold out from the two of them as if made by their hands.

It’s Peter who breaks the silence. “What’s gonna happen next?”

“What do you want to happen?”

“I don’t… I’m not sure, I guess.” Folding his arms tightly around himself so the ragged old fleece he’s wearing bunches upwards to warm his neck, Peter turns on his side a little, his eyes flickering upwards to meet Tony’s. “Everything was so simple when it was just me and my box. It sucked, but I knew what would happen. And before then, there was no reason to - to  _ think _ about my life. It just happened. Now, I’m… scared. That if I don’t get it right I’m gonna stay like this, all screwed up, forever.”

The way in which Tony's face screws up at his declaration is overwhelmingly fond. “Peter, everyone's screwed up. Especially superheroes. We _volunteer_ to deal with the blood and guts of the world, there's gotta be something wrong with us."

The kid lets out an abrupt giggle.

" But - you know what? No matter what, no matter how screwed up you feel, nothing's gonna stop you from being my kid. Nothing in the world - no, the  _ universe _ .”

The truth having been dispensed, Tony sets back his shoulders against the cushions and notes the outlines of clouds dissipating into the captivating gloom of the night. While the kid makes no audible response, his stillness speaks.

“And if you don’t know what you wanna do, May and I can help you out. We’re in your corner.” A deprecating smile breaks out across his face. “I remember leaving Afghanistan, flying back to a world full of people waiting to see Tony Stark’s next move. They needed me to make a plan, crack a joke,  _ do something _ .”

“What did you do first?”

“I asked for a cheeseburger,” he huffs.

Peter lets out a peal of laughter. It’s carefree in the way Tony only hoped it might return to when he saw the kid beaten and exhausted on the floor of the Compound’s entryway. “Must’ve tasted pretty awesome,” he says with a shrug.

“No, kid, it sucked.”

Peter swivels to study him.

“It sucked so bad that it brought me back to reality.”

“And… what was reality like?”

“In 2008? Reality kind of sucked too.” He pushes away thoughts of Obadiah’s leering face. They’re of no use to him now. “But - it’s crazy, because I think it took the kidnapping for me to figure that out. Not that I’m glad it happened. But… silver lining, I suppose.”

“Yeah,” is all Peter says, the furrow in his brow revealing that he’s deep in thought. Tony waits for him, pressing absentmindedly at his left temple where a low-grade headache buzzes. The night air, the peace of the moment, are helping to ease it. 

Eventually, Peter blinks harshly and says, “I think I wanna start patrolling again soon.”

“You do?”

Tony will admit that his blood chills at the admission. It’s the simple fear of a repeat of everything they’re still working to overcome.

“As much as it kind of terrifies me… yeah, I do. I, it’s - helping people, it’s my  _ thing _ .” Peter smiles at Tony, the burnt side of his face still struggling to sustain the lifting of his mouth but conveying the earnest hope of the expression nonetheless. “It’s what makes my reality good. I mean, it’s - it’s hard, and it hurts, and I see people who are at their worst and people who know no better than lashing out, but I also--” 

The kid sobers in an instant.

“Did I ever tell you about the guy I met?” he asks quietly. “At the, uh, at the Queensboro Bridge?”

Tony shakes his head.

“He was standing right on the edge and he - yeah. I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I had to do something. I just - swung by and sat a little way away. He swore something awful at me at first, and I… I was so close to just getting up and leaving. I was sure he wanted me to - to leave, I mean - but I didn’t. Maybe two hours later, he just, he just turned around, walked away from the edge, and got back down onto the sidewalk. He let me walk him home. He didn’t jump. Because I was there. And that was just - you know,  _ wow _ . I always think about that, that one time someone kept living because I was there to help them. I’m not giving up the chance to do that again, a million times if I can. It’s… it’s my responsibility, I guess, and it also just so happens that I love doing it. It’s my real superpower.” He nods at that, a small, tight, affirming motion. Spreading his arms so they hover above him, oversized against the distant backdrop of the stars, he raises his voice: “So, like, why should bad guys be able to get in the way of it? Screw that.”

“Screw that,” echoes Tony, at a loss for further comment. 

He won’t be keeping Peter away from patrolling any time soon. Not when the kid has a sermon like that to back him up.

A chill runs through him at the rippling of a current of breeze along the length of the roof; it jolts a bittersweet memory into his mind. 

“I wasn’t alone in Afghanistan, did you know that?”

“No.”

“I woke up to a man in the cave with me. His name was Yinsen. He…”

_ “Is this the last act of defiance of the great Tony Stark?” _

As easily as Tony forgets on some days, on others he remembers so deeply that he can still smell the dust and smoke and sweat and fear in that cave.

“With his last words, he told me not to waste my life. He was my Spider-Man.” He throws out a grin, returned instantly by the kid, who has his cheek pillowed on an arm to watch him. “And look at me now, right? If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be here today. Definitely wouldn’t be worrying my ass off about you all the live-long day.”

Tony sticks a hand out of his own bulky sweater and ruffles the kid’s hair, anticipating the kid’s swerve and messing with the curls until they’re irredeemably rumpled. Peter lets his lower lip protrude; Tony just laughs at him.

“So… you’re not wasting your life?” hesitates the kid, shuffling a little closer. There’s a more profound meaning behind the question, one that tugs at Tony’s heartstrings in a million different ways.

He fixes Peter with a level gaze. “Not one second of it.”

As if his words have put his mind at rest, the kid flops onto his back, exhaling in a sigh. He doesn’t bother to fix his hair, leaving it tufting away from his head in countless haphazard cowlicks.

The ensuing inhale Tony hears issue from the kid’s throat holds a new, darker note.

“Mister Stark, what happened to the Oscorp guys?”

“You don’t need to worry about them,” Tony asserts firmly.

“Mister Stark.”

“I made sure they’d never think about taking you again.”

Peter rolls away to the side at that: just a little, but enough to let Tony know that his words have unsettled him. He’d done it for the kid, as much as he knew that it wouldn’t be received positively. Perhaps he’d really done it for himself, then. His own peace of mind, certainly, and relief from the pressure of fury behind his ribs.

All he can think now, however, is that he can’t lose the atmosphere he and the kid have cultivated here, the peace, the honesty.

Turning himself to angle his body towards the kid, he begins, “You know, Pete, I - I really want you to know that you can call me. Any time. None of the crap I pulled before you took down Toomes. I’ll be  _ your  _ Spider-Man. If that sounds… good.”

As hesitant as he’d been, Peter’s furtive smile shows he appreciates the sentiment. He sniffs away the dampness of the evening and says, “That sounds really good.”

“When you get back out there, it’s gonna be tough, I can guarantee. Tough as anything. Nobody can really know what you went through. But I’ll be there, and--”

“I get it, Mister Stark.” The kid’s nose scrunches then in that unique, wonky way of his when he’s amused.

“What did I say about interrupting when I’m being nice?” Tony retorts, affecting offense.

Peter pays the words little heed, instead shifting until he’s tucked against Tony’s side and shyly nudging his head into the nook between his shoulder and neck.

At first, Tony’s stunned into stillness. He and Peter have never been very physically intimate in the past although Tony knows the kid derives a lot of comfort from it: he’s placed hands on his shoulders, squeezed once in a while, steered him one way or another with a hand at his back, even tucked strands of hair away from his eyes once or twice, but the hug barrier has rarely been broken. When he puts his hands on Peter, thoughts of flying fists and broken glass overtake his motor functions, drawing him away.

Perhaps it’s these years of wrestling back and forth that make the simplicity of Peter’s current closeness so breathtaking.

“Thank you,” breathes Peter.

The words encompass a thousand instances of gratefulness. He always forgets the way the kid can do that with a single sentence of thanks.

Tony slowly lets his arm curl around the kid’s shoulders. Far above them, a star pierces the blanket of the night with increased potency.

Caring his throat, he hums, wondering how to bring up the strange thought that’s crossed his mind. “Actually, I also wanted to… a couple of days ago, I found this - you know what, forget it. I said nothing.”

“That’s mean!” Tilting his head so he’s gazing up at Tony from just beneath his chin, he pleads, “Tell me what it is.”

“It’s stupid and sappy--”

“I love stupid and sappy. Please, Mister Stark.”

And there arrive the wide baby browns Tony can’t resist.

“Damn puppy eyes,” he mutters, fishing in the pocket of his pants for his phone.

“They still work?”

Frowning, Tony looks away from the glow of the phone display to find a startling amount of uncertainty in Peter’s demeanour.

“What are you talking about, Pete?” he exclaims, letting his genuine disbelief temper his tone. Before the memories can flood in, he lifts his free hand and brushes it gently across the kid’s patchwork cheek. “‘Course they still work. As long as your head is on your neck, you’ll be able to sway me.”

There’s a faint smile from Peter, but it’s not convincing enough for Tony. He continues: “You look great, by the way.”

The kid ducks his head, huffing out a nervous laugh. 

“Still Peter Parker. Still adorable.”

“I’m not adorable,” argues the kid weakly, casting about, “I’m…”

Tony raises an eyebrow. “You're adorable.”

“Okay,” Peter concedes with little reluctance.

Scrolling through his music app until he finds what he was looking for, Tony blows out a breath, feeling nerves unexpectedly rearing their head.

“It’s a song?”

“Yeah. I heard it first while you were out there. Made me think of you. Well, get ready for the sap.”

He presses play.

A soft guitar melody begins the song, slow strumming patterns flooding the rooftop and settling peace across both the figures lying there.

_ Lying in my bed I hear the clock tick and think of you _

_ Turning in circles, confusion is nothing new _

_ Flashback to warm nights _

_ Almost left behind _

_ Suitcase of memories _

_ Time after... _

Peter’s knee settles against Tony’s as he winds himself further around him. The warmth at Tony’s side is elating and calming all at once; he wonders why he was so scared to do this before.

_ Sometimes you picture me, I’m walking too far ahead _

_ You’re calling to me, I can’t hear what you’ve said _

_ And you say go slow _

_ I fall behind _

_ The second hand unwinds… _

An alien but wholly welcome silence descends upon his mind, halting the constant whirring and worrying. Watching Peter’s eyes slide shut on his shoulder, he imagines the kid is experiencing the same thing. There’s a small, confidential smile curling across his face; it’s a  _ thank you  _ of its own.

_ If you’re lost, you can look and you will find me _

_ Time after time _

_ If you fall, I will catch you, I’ll be waiting _

_ Time after time _

Peter’s head bobs in a way that somehow communicates that he understands why Tony connected to these lyrics. They say what he can’t.

Tony is filled with overwhelming affection, so all-encompassing it spills from his chest and fills the Compound, the surrounding forest, the sky itself, for the small boy at his side who has grown an unfathomable amount since the day he first set eyes on a kid in a onesie running around Queens.

\---

_ One month later _

Standing before the long mirror in the corner of his bedroom, Peter studies himself and the bundle of bright red-and-blue fabric he holds.

The suit appears innocuous bunched up in his newly-healed hands that way, but it holds more power than he'd before been aware of: in the eyes of some, the power to condemn him. The power to regard him as a test subject.

_ It had happened out of nowhere _ _ , his danger sense knocking him off guard with a sudden blare that pricked viciously at the back of his neck. Then-- _

_ BANG _

_ The gunshot sent him scrambling the length of the block to reach the source, slipping and almost crashing to the ground with the misplaced momentum of a haphazardly slung string of webbing. Sprinting the last few steps, he rounded the street corner and came across a woman with a gun to her head, flanked by a gang of four masked people. _

_ "Spider-Man! Help, get me out of here--" _

_ "Shut up!" thundered the gang member who had her pulled against his chest. "And you--" he tilted his pistol momentarily in Peter's direction "--put your fucking hands up! Don't try anything!" _

_ As much time as Peter spent rescuing small animals from the perils of New York City traffic and halting the occasional robbery, he wasn't unfamiliar with the city's more ugly crimes. This was a textbook mugging. In fact, it felt almost... too familiar. _

_ Peter raised his hands for the moment, although he had no intention of keeping them there. The gun was his primary concern, however, and until he had a guarantee he'd be able to keep it a good distance away from the scared lady's brains he was eager to play it safe. _

_ His hurried strategization proved in vain, as did the quip half-formed on his tongue, when a sharp sting in the side of his neck compelled him to turn sharply to the side. _

_ Nothing. _

_ Groping at his neck, he closed his hand around a needle. _

_ The drug hit him instantly, knocking his sense of balance and clouding his vision so severely he hadn't a hope of getting to the hostage. _

_ Or was she even a hostage? Had any of it been real? _

_ "Woah, what the hell," he remarked with alarmingly numb lips. The ground rose up to meet him in the way it always does in movies: the screen fades to black, the music halts - but his senses remained dulled to a blurry grey. _

Shedding his t-shirt, Peter clears his throat in a preparatory gesture before twisting around to see the half-healed welts across his back. The angry red swelling that had once ringed each mark has softened to a slightly heightened pink which rings long white lines, forty of them still there but receding.

They're kind of cool, he thinks abruptly. They show that he's still around. That he  _ is  _ strong.

He shucks off his pants then steps into the suit with a deep breath.

_ Then came the hands, what felt like dozens of them to Peter's wandering mind, gripping, running up and down his suit, searching for something. _

_ He was in deep shit; although he was nowhere near coherent enough to fight off the invaders with his lead-heavy limbs, he knew that for sure. These guys had him in their lap - literally. The possibilities of what might happen to Peter ran through his mind in quick, delirious procession, so vividly reasonable that they brought bile to the back of his throat. _

_ He let out a quiet groan, the only act of protestation he could muster. It only drew a laugh from the hands.  _

_ "They hit him hard, didn't they?" _

_ "Not hard enough." It was the voice of the woman he'd rushed to save just moments ago. "Supposed to knock him out." _

_ "Just hit him with another. It can't kill him, right?" _

_ "Got a smaller chance than what's gonna happen once we get him to Norman." _

_ Another furtive, ugly laugh. _

_ A whizzing noise alerted him to the decompression of his suit.  _

_ "Fucking finally." _

_ He was pulled back and forth, limp as a ragdoll, as the million hands worked his suit off him, his last shred of protection slipping off his immobile legs and leaving him in his boxers. _

_ "Oh, Christ. He's... young." _

_ "Still Spider-Man. We do our job." _

Tapping the spider emblem on his chest, Peter watches as the fabric rushes inwards to meet his skin, as he transforms from boy to superhero.

Though he'd managed to hide the lash marks by changing in corners after gym class, there was nothing he could do to conceal the fading burns on his face.

Peter greets the shining, reddened skin there with a mixture of solemnity and strange fondness. He no longer needs dressings, just time, and acceptance of his new appearance. His hair will grow out again. The marks will fade further and further until they're a part of him.

_ The hands seized him again and dragged him back down the street he'd entered so quickly, so blindly. His sluggish heart begun a weak chorus of hammering. Torn between utter panic and complete lethargy, his body rebelling against his screaming danger sense, he found to his dismay that the drugs began to win. A screech of tires; he was lifted onto a metal floor. _

_ Oh, God,  he remembers thinking vaguely.  Mister Stark had better come for me. _

_ The ensuing cacophony of voices was too multitudinous for him to pick out. The second needle in his neck, however, was keenly picked up by his pleading, aching danger sense. The awareness of the fact that a second dose of drugs was about to enter his bloodstream did nothing to prevent his vision fading to black, noise halting. End scene. _

_ He passes out among the million hands and wakes up to white tiles. _

Brushing gloved hands habitually through the errant locks of hair lying across his forehead, he watches himself one last time, tries to connect the dots between the suit Mister Stark had re-made for him, the invisible stitching, the black arrow-lines dividing bold red and blue, the graceful shape of the suit around him culminating at his neck in a neat seam, and the scarred skin that grows from that seam and forms the face of Peter Parker, Spider-Man.

"Peter Parker," he repeats under his breath, "Spider-Man."

He'll admit that the murky flashes of the past that mar his mind now scare him a little. Although he hadn't known it the first time he'd stepped into this suit, he makes himself both strong and vulnerable when he's in it. His heart hadn't stopped beating in his box, but it had come close, whether from thirst or hunger or pain or blood loss or sheer loneliness; and yet now it beats a tattoo against his tender ribs as if making up for any doubts of its fervour, beating and beating and beating.

But there's more than one reason why he's donned the suit today.

Peter slips the mask over his head and vaults over the windowsill, emerging into the brilliantly warm light of the golden hour that lays in delicate streaks across the patchwork of rooftops that make up the puzzle of Queens. He's warmed from the inside out by the light. Shooting a web, taking a leap, he swings, revelling in the cool wind, the airy momentum of his movement.

The glass doors of the Compound cast blinding, enchanting reflections of the sinking sun, but if Peter squints he can make out a familiar form waiting for him in the entry.

Letting go of his web line, he twists backwards in the air, arcing into a backflip just for the hell of it, before dropping to his feet outside the doors.

The first thing he notices is Tony's smile. It's an indulgent thing, packed so full of fondness that Peter feels the excess settling in his own expression, and lit up by the golden light.

Spreading his arms, Peter nods at himself, making a beckoning motion as if encouraging praise from a cheering crowd, then turns on the spot so Mister Stark can see every inch of the suit and know that Peter's decision to wear it again is very deliberate. Through the glass, there's a silent laugh from his mentor. Peter hasn't seen him so unapologetically happy since the day he was taken.

Dropping the goofy act, he pulls off his mask and watches the face across the glass brighten further still. Peter unconsciously brings up a hand to his old burns, a flicker of a reflection showing him the ragged skin for a moment before being swallowed up by the vast glory of the sun. Tony just quirks the corners of his mouth, the affection in his eyes unwavering.

Peter steps through the glass door, throwing out a blade of refracted light that pierces nothing but the safe haven of nature around him, and meets him inside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How did y'all like it?? I love praise and enthusing about fics with people, it makes me light up like a glow bug :)

**Author's Note:**

> Hope that wasn't too angsty for y'all? Comments? Kudos? Screams of pain? Everything's welcome, lads ;)  
> My tumblr: notaparty-trick


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